A look at the first major U.S. retrospective of Tamara de Lempicka at the de Young (Oct 12, 2024–Feb 9, 2025), featuring over 150 works, from her bold portraits to rare drawings, still lifes, and Art Deco fashion and design.
Reflections
Tamara de Lempicka is one of my favorite painters, not only for her art, but for the way she lived her life. What I admire most about her is how often she reinvented herself, her name, her image, her career, and even her identity. She never seemed interested in remaining fixed in one role, and her work reflects that same sense of freedom, ambition, and self-determination.
Born in Warsaw in 1898, Lempicka came of age during a period of enormous social and cultural change. After fleeing revolutionary Russia and settling in Paris, she became one of the defining artists of the Art Deco era, creating portraits that captured the glamour, confidence, and modernity of the 1920s and 1930s. Her paintings feel inseparable from the world that surrounded them: automobiles, fashion, architecture, cinema, and the emergence of a new kind of independent woman.
The women in her paintings feel strong and real. They are not idealized or softened to please the viewer. They have weight, presence, and control. Through bold colors, sharp lines, and smooth surfaces, Lempicka gave women a powerful physical presence that still feels remarkably modern today. Her subjects look directly at us, aware of their own beauty and confident in their place within the world. They are neither passive nor decorative; they command attention.
What makes her work especially interesting is the way she balanced tradition and modernity. Classical influences, Renaissance compositions, Cubist geometry, fashion, and industrial design all come together in her paintings. Looking at her work, one can see echoes of the past alongside the optimism and dynamism of the modern age. Everything feels carefully constructed, from the folds of a dress to the angle of a hand or the curve of a face.
Walking through this exhibition, I was struck not only by the paintings themselves but also by the objects displayed alongside them. The fashion, photographs, drawings, and design pieces helped place her work within the broader visual culture of the Art Deco period. It became easier to understand how deeply connected she was to the worlds of style, luxury, and modern design, influences that continue to shape contemporary fashion and visual culture today.
I have always been drawn to artists whose work feels like an extension of their personality, and Lempicka is one of the clearest examples. She once remarked that every painting she created was, in some way, a self-portrait. Looking at the exhibition, it is easy to understand what she meant. Her paintings seem to reflect not only her technical skill, but also her ambition, confidence, elegance, and desire to shape her own story.
For me, Tamara de Lempicka represents the idea that we can continually redefine ourselves throughout our lives. Her work feels like a reminder that identity is not fixed, and that style, confidence, creativity, and personal reinvention are things we can cultivate over time. More than a century later, her paintings still feel contemporary, not because they follow modern trends, but because they capture something timeless about self-expression, independence, and the power of creating one’s own image.